In the Memorial Room (14 page)

—Yes, she did love, even as a child, her little bed of flowers.

And when I had said, for something to say, —Did she like roses? Elizabeth had said, —Definitely not, well, not particularly. Because of her name. She didn’t like her name. We were named after princesses.

I said, again for something to say, that I thought that was quite romantic.

For something to say
.

I was remembering it.
Just for something to say
. In a dark dark world when it’s too late anyway we think of all the times we have left the light burning and burning, not to see by or read by or be comforted by, just because it was a light which, at a turn of a switch, burned.

Then I saw Elizabeth Foster at the window. She saw me and waved. I waved back. I hoped that she wouldn’t look on it as an invitation.

About five minutes later I felt vibrations coming from the back door. I thought, well, it’s not earthquake weather and I’m not in earthquake country, the little house is feeling its age; it seemed now to be vibrating and shaking everywhere. Then it occurred to me there might be someone at the door. I opened it. The Fosters. The two Fosters.

They came in, obviously both talking at once, their mouths moving like fishes or birds, or cats after a meal – what an exercise of the jaws. I could not understand what they were saying. Their mouths became still. They were staring at me. It was my turn to move my mouth. I wondered if I should try to speak. I swallowed. I tried to remember my normal level of speech, and keeping the image in my mind I said, or I hoped that I said, —I’ve gone deaf, I’ve been to the doctor and there’s nothing to be done, I’m deaf for life.

Not hearing my words, I felt cheated, as if I had been giving them away free. (
Just for something to say!
)

Elizabeth and Dorset stared hard at me, frowned, and then sat down on the sofa. Dorset began the eating motion which I now knew was the ejection of words or – speech.

Then he stopped speaking, and frowned with a facial, not a forehead, frown. Then he composed his face to its normal shape. His face and Elizabeth’s face became suddenly generalised faces, those of people who are not deaf who are speaking to someone who is deaf. For life. The screens were down of course. I had put them up. They were adjusting them, securing them.

I reached for a sheet of paper and a pencil from the table behind me and wrote, —Yes, I’m deaf. There’s nothing I can do about it.

I gave Dorset the paper and pencil. He gazed at the pencil in his hand as if it were a gun. He looked startled.
Have you never used a pencil before
, I said to myself, in the way I was soon to be conversing, to myself, without sound, and without eating the air around me.

—Have you seen a doctor? he wrote.

—Yes. For the rest of my stay here, I’m totally deaf.

—But won’t you leave now? Go home? What will you do?

—I’ll go home when my Fellowship’s over. In the meantime I’ll stay and get on with my work.

—But will you be able to work –
deaf
?

—Why not?

—But it’s so strange, won’t it be strange? Who will look after you?

This last remark was from Elizabeth.

—I’ll look after myself of course, I wrote, trying to put my feeling of dignified and indignant independence into my words and not succeeding.

—It’s terrible, Elizabeth wrote.

—Yes, it’s awful, Dorset added. —If there’s anything we can do –

—Not at the moment, thanks.

—You poor thing. Dorset had a friend who went blind. And my grandmother – Rose’s grandmother too – was deaf, in her old age of course. Are you sure it’s permanent?

—Yes. Permanent.

I’d long ago given up laughing at the joke of permanence ever since the Permanent Way which bisected our town was abandoned and overgrown with weeds and the wall of the old railway station collapsed, and the Inspector of the Permanent Way died.

—Are you
quite
sure? Isn’t it too soon to know? What about specialists?

—I’m speaking the truth, I wrote, aware that the truth also was a joke.

Speaking
the truth.

—Why don’t you speak instead of writing, and we’ll write. You speak.

Dorset crossed the last remark (Elizabeth’s) out and wrote, —Can you speak?

Then he said something to Elizabeth and because I had not yet enough skill in lip-reading I tried to imagine what he had said. What would I have said, I wondered.

Confronted with the immediate personal, I supposed that I, too, would make a transformation to the distantly generalised, and look through a mist of fear, confusion, apprehension and sympathy, while the recognisable ‘he’ became the unfamiliar monstrous ‘they’.

—They are often dumb as well as deaf.

—It often affects them mentally.

—They have to take care in the traffic.

They they they.

Elizabeth wrote, —Aren’t there hearing aids you can get? Would that help?

Feeling a satisfied completeness I wrote, —Nothing can help this kind of deafness.

—Why are you so sure? Dorset wrote. —You have to keep an open mind.

I wrote, —I’m sure. The doctor is sure.

—But he’s only one out of many.

Then Dorset and Elizabeth put their heads close and it seemed to me they were whispering.

Dorset wrote, —You’d better speak. You might forget how to speak.

I watched him then. I watched his face. I could see his attitude as if it had a separate life. I saw it born, grow and set with the Dorset touch as soon as he recognised it. I sensed it was now immovable.

His attitude was, —You can hear if you want to. You can hear if you try. And remember to speak. Speak up. You have to fight what has overtaken you.

Dorset the school teacher, the old-style disciplinarian.

I looked at Elizabeth, trying to guess what she was thinking. I could swear that she was thinking, ‘I wonder what Rose would have thought.’

After a time, when no one spoke and I felt myself once again sinking into an imprisoning loneliness, Dorset wrote, —We have to go out to lunch. Will you be all right if we leave you?

I wrote, —Certainly. Please understand that I’ll just go on with my work, everything as usual. Nothing has changed. Please understand.
Nothing has changed
.

I might easily have said, remembering the dead Inspector of the weedgrown Permanent Way, —All is Permanent. Let’s sit down to the everlasting feast of the everlasting life. Even with music.

As I had expected, within the next two weeks, as the people I had met heard of my affliction they came out of curiosity and sympathy to visit me to offer advice, information and sympathy, all of which I took, I hope, with a good grace, for during those first few weeks I played the role of myself as a silent sufferer for whom, nevertheless, nothing had changed, as if in my love affair with life, although I had been betrayed, with life declaring itself unfaithful to me, I continued to affirm my love with the heaven-encircling lie which became a rainbow-circumstance of truth,
Nothing has changed
.

There was even a God in heaven who repeated the Beatitudes in skin-speech and eye-speech and naked-sole-of-the-foot-speech,
Blessed are they
.

Haniel and Louise Markham, the nearest in distance, their apartment only a few streets away, came the first week. I never learned how they knew of my deafness. They were not appalled by it, I found, as they might have been had I been stricken blind. They brought me books, a portable supply of words that I could only look at now, and see in my mind, for my inner hearing of them was fast vanishing and they were becoming to mean mouth-movements only, in others, and in myself mouth-and-throat movements. I turned the pages of the book of French poetry and
Du Côté de Chez Swann
and
La Littérature Anglaise par les Textes
, and I stared and stared at the words as if they were passersby whom I should never see again. How strange they looked!

As high as cypresses were wont to soar among the pliant wayfaring trees.

That was Virgil,
Eclogue 1.25
.

It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills and ointment boxes’.

That was
Blackwood’s Magazine
writing of Keats’
Endymion
.

And custom lie upon thee with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

That was Wordsworth who shared the joke of me, Harry Gill, with a character called, I believe, Goody Blake. Harry Gill’s physical makeup was not all it should have been. Was it he whose legs swelled or was it his teeth that chattered chattered chatter still?

He knows not, the man who dwells prosperously on dry land,

how careworn on the icy-cold ocean I have lived through

long winters, an exile from joy,

cut off from kinsmen;

encompassed with icicles.

The old man, the Seafarer.

And every tongue, through utter drought, was withered at the root;

That was the Ancient Mariner.

A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels.

My quotations do not reflect my own state of mind at the time – the Seafarer, the Ancient Mariner are themselves – how intensely they were! – though I felt in time the
tongue withered at the root
might apply to me.

—You will keep on with the scholarship, of course? Haniel wrote on the now ever-present sheet of notepaper.

—Yes.

—Rose Hurndell had her afflictions too, you know. She limped.

—Yes.

—She used a stick to walk.

—Yes.

I felt no jealousy or disdain at this comparison of afflictions. Even when one has reached the age of thirty-three one knows a little of the peculiarities shared by human beings, of the need to shine in sickness and in health: the biggest tumour, the biggest prize, the biggest strawberry in the garden, I am lame, ah but I am blind, my lameness almost cost me my life.

My blindness…

I hate like this…and this.

I love…like this…and this…

Even Hamlet, or should one say, Most of all, Hamlet, most human, put himself in the competitive field of brotherly love:

‘I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers…’

Match that if you will.

My wound had thirty stitches and I am alive to tell the tale.

—Will you be cured?

—No.

—Have you had the best advice?

—Yes.

This puzzled Haniel and Louise as it had Dorset and Elizabeth who, by the way, met Haniel and Louise at the front gate and conducted them to my front door, as if they had been pre-infected with my condition.

—Haniel is deaf in one ear.

—Oh.

—Haniel has a hearing aid.

—Oh.

As with the Fosters, conversation lapsed, even on paper, or especially on paper where the words had nothing to disguise their thinness and meanness, where an Oh became one disapproving syllable instead of an admiring incredulity; nor could the pen smile or gesture as it spoke, and though one would have expected the words to contain their own smiles they did not do so and the resulting silence instead of being enriched with the satisfactions of completed speech, vibrated with unhappiness and frustration; it was a barren plain; it was its own defoliant.

The Markhams, like the Fosters, suggested that I might need looking after: Louise reminded me that she had ‘looked after’ Rose Hurndell and there had been no complaints about her ability; after all, she was a trained nurse, and keeping Haniel alive, with his heart, kept her skill exercised.

All the same, I could tell that their main idea of salvation for me was books and more books, for they seemed to equate deafness with being housebound and in this they were not wholly incorrect for I was afraid to go into the street and I had not done so since my visit to Dr Rumor and I had not protested when one morning Dorset and Elizabeth came to the door with their arms full of enough groceries to last at least two weeks.

Haniel and Louise promised to visit me regularly, each time bringing as many books as I asked for. It appeared that they were pleased to have me in what seemed to be permanent capture.

These seemings and appearings are necessary to my story, to counteract the material actualities among which were the refrigerator which continued to work, the oil-filled heater which continued to heat and the bandage-white hot water cylinder which continued to supply hot water.

I have to confess that my deafness alarmed and frightened me and I could not understand why the thought of taking some action or getting further advice paralysed me. Perhaps I was conducting a human experiment after all, living in prison, in a monastery, dyeing my senses a certain colour so as to fit a certain race whose prestige and welfare might have been more considered had it been blind. Whatever the reason, my deafness and my inability to take any action, if any could have been taken, persisted, and for two weeks I stayed in the small house receiving guests within a few days of each other, as the news spread, a process described by the local newspaper as
téléphone arabe
.